Team Alerts in Visual Studio Team Foundation Service

In the previous version of Visual Studio ALM, it was quite complicated to add alerts. That is, unless you wanted each individual user to add their own alerts (which in the enterprise is unreasonable) then you had to use something like the TFS Event Handler.

We have been looking to Microsoft to fill at least some of the gap, and now they have.

Does this Alerts manager do it all… well… no… but it does do a lot. You can set alerts at the Team level but not at the Team Project level (assumed by setting at the default team level) nor at the Collection level. While many enterprises will still want to do the SOAP events (and they can) this does set much of the configuration onto the teams.

Figure: Many features but not all which means we still have the need for SOAP

However, if you want to set alerts you can do so at either the “Team” or the “My” level:

Work Item Alerts

Checkin Alerts

Build Alerts

Code Review Alerts

I am sure that this list will be added to as the Team Foundation Service matures and based upon feedback from customers, but the current incarnation is still pretty awesome.

Figure: Helpers for new Alerts

I like the ability to have a number of helpers for creating new events as it will give users ideas without them having to spelunk the fields and figure it out for themselves. Its kind of like a cheat sheet for the features.

All in all, this is an invaluable addition to the feature set…

-Do you want to move to Visual Studio 11 Team Foundation Service NOW? Microsoft is providing a Go-Live license (that means that it is supported in production) and you can use it today! For help moving forward contact rick.flath@nwcadence.com …